


Lateralus

by ClockworkCourier



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical Worms, Character Death Fix, F/F, Fix-It, Groundhog Day, Jon gets to do that now, Life has many doors Jon Boy, M/M, Multi, Sharing a Bed, Team as Family, Time Loop, Time Shenanigans, You know that part in Groundhog Day where Phil goes absolutely bonkers and does whatever he wants, post-160
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23124562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkCourier/pseuds/ClockworkCourier
Summary: Jon opens a door and starts again.And again.And again.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Sasha James & Tim Stoker
Comments: 23
Kudos: 184





	Lateralus

**Author's Note:**

> idefk what i'm doing with this fic but it's partially inspired by the absolutely fantastic time travel fix-ity fics i can't get enough of? and also by all the great groundhog day-themed fics out there that i've devoured like a roomba on cheez-it crumbs. i have no idea if i'm doing them justice but whatevs i'm slightly quarantined from school and i have nothing better to do. so yeah, jon gets stuck in a time hamster wheel. 
> 
> fic title from the song 'lateralus' by tool which has all kinds of spiral vibes (which i played with relentlessly) aaaand chapter title comes from the game 'green glass doors' which is nonsensical until it isn't! and you can only play it once!
> 
> enjoy!

The hallway is the colour of phosphenes.  
  
They spin and bend in dizzying patterns, walls undulating with bruise colours and flickers of optical pressure-blue like firecrackers. Jon curiously presses a hand against one wall, watching the puzzle pieces of light scatter before reassembling around the vague shape of his hand. Wherever he steps, they dart out in mad fractals, spiralling outward and leaving behind Fibonacci footprints. He _thinks_ he should be amused, or perhaps concerned. At the moment, he feels a dull, tired Nothing, like the grey space in between dreams.  
  
He walks ahead, down the gentle inward curve of the corridor, this endless spiral of rapid eye movement patterns—one tessellates into birds and fish as he passes by. Some distant, muffled part of his mind suggests there _should_ be a door nearby. He thinks a series of words, and they fall out of his head and turn neon red upon hitting the wall, scrolling along in a marquee before fading at the furthest curve.  
  
 _WHERE IS HELEN  
  
WHERE IS HERE  
  
THIS IS THE SPIRAL BUT I DO NOT KNOW WHERE HERE IS  
  
_The words scroll far away and any trace of his thoughts leave with them. All he can think to do is walk on.  
  
At some point, the hallway goes black. It isn’t pure darkness, but more like the electric black of a TV screen, glowing from some charge beneath its surface. His steps make ionised-blue ripples across the floor (if it _is_ a floor), sending kinetic shockwaves of energy through the endless expanse. He _knows_ it’s still a hallway, just as much as he knows he’s walking through Forever. When he clears his throat, there’s a line of static-grey that fizzles through the air, made of synaesthesia. Experimentally, he coughs, sending a grey and yellow shock into the void.  
  
Then, a Blue voice hums through the space.  
  
 _WHAT DO YOU WANT_ , it asks. The words fall onto the floor like a felled forest, sprawling out and away—one _W_ slides under Jon’s shoes.  
  
He doesn’t know. His not-knowing makes a pool of light the colour of a migraine open under his feet, threatening to suck him down into its endlessness.  
  
 _ANSWER_ , it says.  
  
The pink-blue occipital aura laps at the tips of Jon’s shoes like a tidal ebb. Vaguely, he knows this is a punishment for not Knowing and that every second (month, year, era, epoch) that passes by will draw him further in, drowning him in its Ignorance. His jaw works on words, and grinding his teeth makes white clouds appear in front of his face. Finally, he says, “A door.”  
  
Silence. Black silence.  
  
The pool of light fades and skitters outward like falling comets.  
  
And then there is a red door.  
  
It stands alone, disconnected from any visible wall. It’s simple in design—barn red painted over long wooden slats with a wrought iron door handle. Jon studies it from a distance, thinks about it, imagines what might be behind.  
  
“If I go through this door, what’s on the other side?” he asks.  
  
Immediately, a scene stutters up around him like the start of a movie. The charged electric screen of the void creates an achingly familiar. A long street with tarmac puckered with age and wear, identical houses lined in neat rows with messy gardens and milk crates and satellite dishes, electric wires overhead, and one streetlight at the end of the row that flickers like a heartbeat. The red door serves as the entrance to one home with a philodendron dying in one window, yellow leaves turned outward like pleading palms. Jon _knows_ this house, just as much as he _Knows_.  
  
He will open that door and—  
  
He looks down at his right hand, now clutching a blue glass bottle filled with wilting daisies. One leaf comes loose and trails down the back of his hand like spider silk.  
  
And in his left hand is a book.  
  
No, not _a_ book. A _Book_. Its cover leers up at Jon, taunting, _daring_ him.  
  
Through that door is something terrible, something he’s avoided in nightmares. Something that faces out toward a sleepy street in Bournemouth and spreads its wooden pedipalps to swallow up foolish children who read too much. The glass bottle falls from his hand and shatters on the worn pavement and—  
  
The blackness returns, and he’s alone with the door.  
  
“No,” he says. _NO_ floats toward the door and locks it up tight. Jon swears he can see the shadows of long feelers plying at the bottom of the door, desperate to sense him. “No, not this door.”  
  
 _WHICH DOOR WOULD YOU LIKE_  
  
Each word falls from the sky, landing around the door before collapsing inward, crushing the wood beneath their weight until it’s a mess of broken boards, oozing meat, and gossamer. And then it’s gone. It may not have existed.  
  
He wants—  
  
The hallway changes, now lined in yellow doors. Old doors, new, ancient, broken, iron, wood, ceramic, stone, glass, probable, impossible—each painted that garish yellow. Some have handles of molten metal, others made of dripping ice, one made of a hand reaching outward in a claw-like grip. As he walks along the corridor, he hears screaming coming from the other side of a door that looks best suited for an old Victorian mansion. One door, appearing to be made of folded yellow paper, resounds with a heavy-fisted knock that shakes it on its hinges.  
  
 _NO_ , he thinks. The word burns a brand into the surface of an ugly, knotted door. None of these are right. None of these will open to the correct place.  
  
 _WHAT IS CORRECT_  
  
Each door turns into those letters, and then compresses under an impossible weight until they disappear. In their place is a great expanse of dazzling colours forming arches taller than mountains.  
  
Then, something tells him, _Check your pocket._  
  
It’s a soft voice—no, _not_ a voice. A thought made real, folded and tucked away into the part of Jon’s brain that turns synaptic energy into electrical impulses into codes in his dendrites into shapes and colours created through a cultural educational process into English words that exist and do _not_ exist. They _sound_ like a voice, whisper-soft in the channels of his grey matter.  
  
And different electric impulses move his hand to his pocket.  
  
He reaches in and feels the outline of something _strange._ It’s a key, no doubt. When he tugs it out of his pocket and holds it under the twisting suggestion of light, he sees that it’s made of the precise iridescent geometry of bismuth, suggesting a handle and teeth like any key. When he turns it over in his palm, it shines with certainty. It will open the _correct_ door, he knows.  
  
 _ARE YOU CERTAIN,_ asks the Impossible. The words make stained glass on Himalayan walls. _ONCE IT IS OPEN, DO YOU KNOW YOU CAN SHUT IT AGAIN—  
  
_ He knows he can.  
  
“I need this door,” he says.  
  
The letters tumble from his lips in patterns of absinthe-green glass, clattering across the expanse like rolling coins. At some distance, they pile atop one another until they form a glass door, familiar in shape but not in texture or colour. Jon squints at it, trying to find something recognisable in its form. At first, he thinks it may belong to the front of a museum he’s frequented.  
  
No. No, it must belong to a—  
  
The key hums in his hand, sending a shock through his bones that reminds him of urgency.  
  
As the colours turn and twist about like manic cirrus clouds overhead, Jon walks up to the green glass door and finds a simple silver keyhole near the centre. It’s so quaint in design that it hardly matches the intricate key he holds, but he slides the teeth in, and they grind pleasantly as they find their way home. With one stiff turn, it unlocks and sends multicoloured sparks into the air.  
  
The Impossible Thing does not speak. It doesn’t need to. Jon Knows that there is something on the other side of that door that he can’t anticipate. The Eye—  
  
He blinks. The _Eye?_ He should know what that is, but it’s as distant as the familiarity of the door.  
  
That in mind and out of it, he pushes against the green glass until it opens with a singing yawn. Then, he steps inside.

ꙮ

  
There’s a steaming mug of tea on a worn oak desk. The mug is sky blue, painted in Cady-from-the-library’s ceramics class in 2014, chipped on the handle from a fall when Serena Powell dropped it while she was trying to do a good deed of cleaning and drying all the mugs. Lapsang souchong, slightly stale in smell—Twinings, purchased when Ibrahim had to do research for architecture on the Strand and happened to pass by the flagship store. Still steeping, meant to be strong, the way Jon likes.  
  
Jon stares at the desk, at its contents. He knows there are seven paperclips in the right upper-hand drawer, and seven if you count the bright red one slightly bent out of use from tugging too hard on an eighty-page dissertation. If he opens the bottom drawer on the left side, he’ll find a forgotten package of Digestives, four years expired. Pushpins, adhesive note pads, half-drained biros, a packet of Nescafe crystals—it’s all as he remembers it. He doesn’t have to look at the desk across from his, topped with a Monty Python quote-a-day calendar. As soon as he sees what’s on his own desk, he knows exactly what day it is.  
  
He lets out a long, shaky breath, seeing the statement of Nathan Watts half-tucked under a tape recorder.  
  
Then, with his heart frantically stuttering against his ribcage like a nervous prisoner, he looks down at his own hands. His unscarred, intact hands. No mottled, waxy flesh from Jude Perry’s burning handshake. No pocks from ravenous worms. When he reaches up to his face, his skin is smooth save for the barest scrub of his stubble, and his hair is shorn shorter than it’s been in years.  
  
No. It’s as short as it should be. He hasn’t grown it out since Oxford.  
  
Because, as his mind races to catch up and rewind and go through the process of reasoning out his surroundings, he knows that all that’s happened to him _hasn’t_ happened. He—  
  
He opened the Door. He read the Statement and brought the world to the edge of calamity.  
  
Except he _didn’t_.  
  
Jon sits down in his chair; it creaks as it immediately lists left, just as he remembers. His knees feel ill-structured, balanced on bird bones rather than a substantial human skeleton. All the world seems to shift slightly out of focus, making him feel nauseous. He blinks hard, closes his eyes, brings his hands up so his fingers nudge his glasses to his forehead as the heels of his palms press into his sockets. Lights dance along pressure ridges— _phosphenes—  
  
Once it is open, do you know you can shut it again?  
  
_Jon drops his hands into his lap and the nose pads of his glasses slide down far enough to irritate. He sits, motionless, his near-sightedness making a watery blur of his desk (–his vision was perfect at the end).  
  
He doesn’t need to Know to be aware of _where_ and _when_ he is, although the _why_ and _how_ escape him.  
  
 _Which door would you like?  
  
Are you certain?  
  
_Jonathan Sims, the Archivist of the Magnus Institute, looks at the statement of Nathan Watts regarding the creature known as the ‘Angler Fish’. He reaches out, fingers brushing the familiar raised impression of the circular ‘record’ symbol, before he presses down and hears the machinery within click and whirr to life.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://radiojamming.tumblr.com)


End file.
